Unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
In keeping with Moore's Law, the number of transistors that can be practicably incorporated into an integrated circuit has doubled approximately every two years. This trend has continued for more than half a century and is expected to continue until at least 2015 or 2020. However, simply adding more transistors to a single-threaded processor no longer produces a significantly faster processor. Instead, increased system performance has been attained by integrating multiple processor cores on a single chip to create a chip multiprocessor and sharing processes between the multiple processor cores of the chip multiprocessor. Furthermore, the multiple processor cores of a chip multiprocessor can share other common system components, which may facilitate the manufacture of a system that is lower in cost and smaller in size compared to multiple single-core processors that collectively may have the same processing performance.